Felicity Castagna

This part of the Parramatta River where I walk is the western end, the part where it turns shallow and serpentine. This is not the river of historical islands and weekend sailing and houses with water views; that exists where the river breaks into the harbour further east. This is the river of narrow channels and mudflats and mangroves; of sex clubs and factories and unmarked burial grounds; of lunatics and God and disappearing buildings.

If the photograph, as Susan Sontag claims, is a note-taking form, then these images are notes on suburbia. Suburbia not just as a place but as a way of thinking and living, a lens through which we can see the world and understand our place within it; suburbia as a possibility.

I want to write an essay about Helena Fox’s remarkable Young Adult novel How It Feels To Float but I find myself distracted by the way that both reviewers and Young Adult literature advocates commonly talk about YA. I don’t want to talk about this book like that.

There is no place like home because home is not actually a place.

What I do know is that, while once simply writing the west was a threat to the status quo now the real political imperative is to stand in the dark with our eyes wide open, welcoming the uncertain. It is an invitation to undo the ways ‘things are done’ and invite alternatives into the equation. Bad writing has always been about having the last word and leaving others in silence. Good writing opens up a conversation about who we are that may never end.

Long before those postcards of Bondi Beach and Sydney Harbour co-opted our image of Sydney, Parramatta was its watery centre.

In Felicity Castagna’s No More Boats, we are repeatedly reminded that the novel’s locale, Parramatta, marks the shifting aqueous site in Sydney’s Western suburban landscape where ‘saltwater meets fresh’. Historically, this is the place where Australia’s early colonial explorers, travelling up the Parramatta River from Sydney Cove in 1788, could take their boats no further. It is also one of numerous sites of resistance to European invasion by the Aboriginal warrior, Pemulwuy. In Castagna’s hands, this rich and multi-layered history of place is embodied in the topography of the Parramatta River and its intricate estuarine environment, creating a wonderfully nuanced metaphor.

‘That’s how I write: from place. And it’s the place itself that drives who the characters become, and how the narrative shapes itself.’